I want to tell my story. It’s about how, up until 2 years ago, I never felt productive in my work. It went something like this: It’s a Friday or Saturday night and I have some free time to work on personal or freelance projects and I wouldn’t know what to start on. Or I […]
What is this ‘Design Myth’ thing?
A few years ago, after one too many ‘things’ related to my work as a designer got under my skin and frustrated me, I resolved to find the common theme and discover how to overcome this frustration I was experiencing. The common theme was that people who aren’t designers don’t understand design, designers and the […]
Fear of failure is overrated
“What people are afraid of isn’t failure. It’s blame. Criticism. We choose not to be remarkable because we’re worried about criticism. We hesitate to create innovative movies, launch new human resource initiatives, design a menu that makes diners take notice, or give an audacious sermon because we’re worried, deep down, that someone will hate it […]
What I learned at An Event Apart – Austin
Over the month of October, I recapped all 12 conference talks in previous blog posts. Looking back through my notes from each speaker and blogging about my take-aways helped me really organize my thoughts and remember all the great things I learned. The things I heard at the conference fall into one of three categories: […]
An Event Apart: Jared Spool
At An Event Apart – Austin 2013, Jared Spool spoke about why it’s great time to be an experience designer. Here are my take-aways: Design = The rendering of intent Imitation is: less expensive less risky where design is not valued On the flip side, innovation is: more expensive more risky where design is valued […]
An Event Apart: Mike Monteiro
At An Event Apart – Austin 2013, Mike Monteiro spoke about how it’s often the designer who’s at fault when the client requests something that makes designers want to role their eyes. The whole talk was full of really awesome quotable bits of advice. So these take-aways are basically all of those quotables: Mike Monteiro […]
An Event Apart: Beyond Play by Joshua Davis
At An Event Apart – Austin 2013, Joshua Davis shared his thoughts on why work and play should be the same, but for many, they are opposites. Here are my take-aways: Joshua Davis is a generative artist who uses computer code to generate repetitive patterns and designs that are highly detailed and pretty amazing – […]
An Event Apart: Preprocessing is for Everybody
At An Event Apart – Austin 2013, Chris Coyier shared his thoughts on CSS Preprocessing, specifically SASS. Here are my take-aways: CSS as a language is not as ‘abstracted’ as it could be, and so preprocessing serves to solve this. Preprocessing involves writing variables, mix-ins which are sets of variables, extends, and other short-hand ways […]
Nicholas Burroughs once said…
Minimalism is not a lack of something. It’s simply the perfect amount of something. —Nicholas Burroughs
An Event Apart: Putting UI’s in Motion
At An Event Apart – Austin 2013, Val Head shared with us her knowledge of CSS animations. Here are my take-aways: A few animation concepts to remember – all of which are CSS ‘easing’ options: slow in / slow out – gives an organic/natural feel follow through – where object will go past end point […]